Due to various reasons, log file management and archival is a common requirement in Information Technology (IT). These reasons may include legal requirements, fraud prevention and detection, statistic collection and analysis, incident and problem detection.
The process of managing and archiving these logs is very manual and time-consuming without an automated process to manage and store the files. An organization may have many physical servers that each capture log data whenever any action occurs. For example, when someone visits the organization's website, a log file may be created on one of the servers that serves the organization's website. However, there may be multiple servers each tasked with serving the organization's website and each may serve the same data. As a result, different users may hit different servers when they access the website. Because each server has its own log file specific to the server and separate from the other servers, log files for the same task may be kept on many different servers. Log files are generally not logged to a unified log file. This results in the problem of multiple, spread-out log files without any process to bring them together in a concise format for ease of management and archiving.